India

With all the incidents occurring in India regarding the Jats’ demand for reservation in job and education and many more communities joining in the protests with the same demand in mind, every aware citizen at least once has thought whether reservation as a law should exist or be entirely withdrawn. There are many for and against opinions about this issue and this article seeks to present and review the logic and mindset behind each category of opinions.

“Why did the Indian Constitution create the concept of reservation in the first place?”, one might ask. When India gained Independence from two centuries of British colonial rule, country leaders made it a point to include reservation in education and work in the Constitution because the caste system that had been prevalent in India since centuries(earlier as The Varna System) and the atrocities branching out from it during the Colonial rule needed to be redressed and several economically and socially backward communities, some rendered so by the caste system, needed to be brought at par with the other communities. The then Indian leaders deemed reservation as a solution to eradicate the damages of the caste system, to provide level playing field for every citizen alike, and to promote equality amongst all the existing communities on all platforms other than the judiciary.  The process used social, economic, and educational pointers to determine backwardness of a particular section of a community.

However, after almost seventy years, what has reservation achieved to alleviate the sufferings and achieve the targets? It has done a very minor change and many problem areas still remain without any impact. Reservation in its two forms, in education and in work, was supposed to eradicate discrimination, however in most cases; it seems to be doing the opposite. For example, consider a person from Scheduled Caste, with a family income of say 6 lakhs per annum, gets into a good school, a good college, and further on acquires a good job, through his/her reservation quota. Now consider another person, from SC, who lives in a remote and financially village of the country, who probably has just carried on the indigenous profession of as acquired by parents, who is actually ignorant of the essence of education, doesn’t get to reap the benefits of his reservation quota because he never gets the social platform to even know about it. Thus within the same community, a hierarchy is created, with the more economically well off person getting the benefit he/she doesn’t need while the one who does is more or less ignorant about it. Also, the concept of the creamy layer, a term used for to refer to the relatively wealthier and better educated members of the OBCs, doesn’t exist in case of the SC and ST. Add to that, the dissent of the people from general castes who have no quota and see what they rightfully claim to be their own seats in educational institutions as deserved on the basis of sheer merit being reserved through the quota for a person who probably got a lower rank in the same entrance examination. This creates a feeling of resentment and antipathy. Similarly, if a person from the General category hails from a BPL (below poverty line) family, he/she despite being the real benefactor of the reservation quota, doesn’t get it because of mere technicalities. The reservation quota for education makes sense when it comes to the social as well as economical uplifting of the backward classes however if a person get through to good schools and colleges through the reservation quota, he/she thus gets the opportunity to study and nurture himself/herself under the same academic environment as that of the general communities and henceforth a quota for jobs seems unnecessary. While this seems to be the general convincing logic, let me also mention that despite reservation, casteism in India prevails as dominantly as ever.

While it is a valid point, that people who have been oppressed since generations, need social as well as economic uplifting and as the government originally aimed to provide them with, empowerment. But to what limit? What should be the determining factor which would let the government know which group of people needs empowerment and which doesn’t? If a certain group of people is seen as needing empowerment and privileges, even if that group is not currently being oppressed or suppressed in any kind of way, just because of the caste they belong to, isn’t that another form of discrimination? Has reservation in jobs and education really been able to evict the caste and power hierarchy that exists in the society? Cases of economically forward but socially backward people are a common sight throughout the country. The Supreme Court of India had suggested scrapping all forms of reservation in higher educational institutions, however it doesn’t seem like any action was taken.

Also, reservation in jobs also tends to decrease the overall productivity of an individual and thus of the nation as a whole. A person can get through institutions of higher education and even acquire a job through the reservation quota, but this only gets that person to be economically benefitted, technically it still doesn’t help one with social progress.

Though reservation is required for the economic uplifting of citizens, on the social front it doesn’t seem to be helping much, and the social stigma regarding these ‘backward’ classes can only be cleared through proper education and awareness. Reservation should be revised in the following ways to cater to the needs of the people who are still in need of it:

1.Reservation should be focused on the economically backward people of the society, along with proper awareness to abdicate the ignorance of the needy so that they can use the privilege they deserve.

2. Reservation in work should be removed. Since those who have already taken the benefit of reservation in their educational field, they already gained equal opportunity to nurture their abilities and thus should face the rat-race at par with those who didn’t get the privilege. 

3. The creamy layer concept should exist even for the SC-ST as well, as their is no true way to discern who is socially backwards and who isn’t. 

4. More of the reserved classes who have used the privilege of reservation for two or three generations should be encouraged to give up their reservation quotas.